KIWI SME ROBOTIC AUTOMATION
NOW A MUST NOT A MAYBE
Christchurch-based Design Energy is in somewhat
of a unique situation. It has a product and service
that most Kiwi businesses think they are too small
for, but the stark reality is that if they put it in place
they would forever wonder how they ever worked
without it – robotic automation.
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While the company provides for New Zealand's
larger producer it is increasingly seeing a meeting of
ways between smaller businesses and the robotic
technology beginning to serve them.
The company’s founder and managing director
Mike Shatford says that manufacturing automation
is now intrinsic in other parts of the world, but in
comparison New Zealand lags far behind in terms
uptake albeit not through its own fault.
“New Zealand has not historically been able to
deploy automation/robotics due to our smaller
production volumes and therefore not the target
for the type of automated systems that have been
available that required a mass production scale for
efficiencies,” Mike tells Engineering News.
But, he says, the robotic automation landscape
that’s now available on the home front has changed
due to this massive global uptake. And with that
opportunity knocks for many SMEs.
“The scale of industry and demand is driving robot
cost down and capability of technology upwards,”
he says. But leaving the train station late has put us
behind at all stops.
“Due to that historic inability to automate, mainly
due to required scale, we are also missing
skillsets within industry. Where large countries
have had continuous use, experience, learning as
automation technology progressed – our engineers,
accountants, maintenance people are not as knowledgeable
with robotics,” Mike explains. He says
this flows through again to not knowing how to use
them efficiently or even how to maintain them.
Measuring and justifying the benefits of robotic
automation is where Design Energy steps in, in
terms or having the products, implementing the
systems and tweaking the efficiency on a case-bycase
nature.
Design Energy has analysed New Zealand’s
business terrain and through that it has isolated
where robotics automation can benefit Kiwi manufacturing
the most. Large scale manufacturing,
perhaps surprisingly to many, did not come out at
the top of the list.
“New Zealand has a unique business infrastructure
with a swag of SME’s – in fact, over 97% of
New Zealand businesses are classified as SMEs
according to MBIE,” Mike tells Engineering News.
It’s here, he says, because “they are the majority of
our producers,” where the company now believes it
can offer its services best.
“They don’t need the speed, they need the flexibility.
It’s also harder to get a return on investment as
SMEs are making smaller quantities, so it takes
a level of expertise to first off, evaluate if robotic
automation technology will benefit them, then if so,
and many will be very surprised to find out that in
most cases the answer is ‘yes’, install, train and
work with the customer to make huge gains in efficiencies
and most importantly greater profit.”
He says robotics automation should be nothing to
fear. Design Energy, under the AutoMATE brand,
has been a national provider of robotic automation
hardware (robot sales) and solutions (turn-key’s,
training, service) for the past decade. Mike and his
team know the local automation terrain well.
"In contrast to many industrial technology resellers
we have built a complete offering around robots –
we can supply a robot, training, servicing, but many
New Zealand users do not have the skills in-house
to deploy robotics so we can step in to provide a
turn-key solution."
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